YouTube adds captioning

YouTube have recently announced their new captioning features for all videos being uploaded onto their video service. The interface is quite simple and can be accessed through your “My Videos” interface, all you have to do is click the edit button on any videos you have uploaded in the past.

This is pretty cool. I know for years when I worked for News Digital Media I was a preacher of captioning and transcription. Captioning and transcription bring many benefits to your business should you apply them to your videos, some of these benefits include:

• opening your audiences up to those that don’t speak English
• those that struggle with accents, especially seeing a lot of our video comes from overseas
• accessibility benefits for those that can’t hear or are hard of hearing
• SEO benefits of exposing hidden content to search engines (this is more specific to transcripting)

This never really ends up happening in bigger companies though as the overhead is quite high. You would need to automate the service if you output a large amount of videos, otherwise you are just sinking a lot of money into an area of the web that is not really making many people money at the moment.

So it’s good to see that YouTube have released this feature to the masses and got the ball rolling. It’s as easy as uploading a closed caption file for your video, which has already been done on many sites including Top Gear footage, random product reviews and the odd japanese animation. Perhaps soon, I will be understanding all the jokes in those crazy Japanese game shows that end up in my inbox.

Molt:n skydiver with captioning turned on

There is one catch. To create these closed caption files you need to purchase software or get it done by a professional service. More information is provided by Google on this topic if you want to explore captioning your videos any further.

This post is tagged under: accessibility, innovation